First ballot count for primary election

On Friday, the Washington Elections Division released the first numbers on returned ballots for the primary election, which ends August 1. So far, 12,097 of Clark County’s voters or 4.9 percent have cast their ballots. At the state level, that number is at 222,551 or 5.8 percent. The county has 245,560 registered voters while the state has more than 3.8 million.

So what does this tell us? Not much other than we don’t have as many early-bird voters as the state as a whole, and we pale in comparison to Ferry County in which 17.7 percent of the voters have cast ballots already.

We won’t know how the candidates stand until the preliminary results are released on August 1 at 8:30 p.m.

Last time, Vancouver voted on a mayor was in November 2013 when Tim Leavitt edged out Bill Turlay by 1,521 votes. A total of 92,863 ballots were counted for that race.

Here are the today’s numbers for all available Washington counties, which will be updated on Aug. 24 at 7:00 a.m.: